It's hot, people are away. Those in hot places run from air conditioner to another. Time to reflect. Time to think.

It's a perfect time to send a tribute to a beautiful woman, and an immense singer. She lived life on the edge, then fell off at the untimely age of 27. Loved by many, she destroyed herself.

If you ever lost a friend in this very hard industry, take a couple of minutes to listen to Janis Joplin sing with Jimi Hendrix playing guitar. We will always remember those we have lost, especially those who never got famous.

How depressing! Must be the heat!

Getting back to work. In July, we increased the number of enquiries for our much-loved members by 30%. Shocked? We were. Working to keep it up (not literally) and make sure August and September work out even better.

We just passed one million visits to the website. We don't really know how many individual people that means have visited, probably half of that. If we get conservative, it's might be a third of that - 330,000...

That's: 770 Fully loaded Jumbo Jets, or 110,000 threesomes, or more than the population of Iceland!

Thanks for all the compliments many of you have sent, also for the massive amount of suggestions and complaints about stuff not working. We have done a lot of work to make things as smooth as possible for users and advertisers and most of that came from you. We really do appreciate it.

We will hit one million contact actions (messages, clicks on phone number and clicks to website) for our advertisers in the next couple of months, so we do know we have generated a lot of usefulness to both advertisers and users. We are looking forward to the next steps where we will bring more functionality and value to everyone.

Massage Republic just had its first anniversary - the service has been online for a year! Some stats:

Since we launched we have achieved over 500,000 contact actions for our advertisers

Over 70,000 people will visit the site this month

All of us here would like to say thanks to both our users and advertisers - for hopefully getting some satisfaction from the service and for all of the great feedback and comments you have made over the last months. We worked hard to make a good place for all of you to find each other online. We are really happy we have been able to help lots of working girls and boys make a better living!

If you have any comments or suggestions, please get in touch! Here's a quick update on some of the things we've done over the last weeks:

For users

We upgraded your account page so you can see what matters to you in one place: your favourites, reviews and questions.

For advertisers

Limits on free accounts: As the number of users has increased, we have had to introduce a limit on the number of enquiries a free listing can get. If you reach the limit in a 30 day period you will get an email and your profile will not be visible in search results for a couple of weeks - it will always remain available on the site and people will still be able to contact you. We have done this to make it fairer for all of our free members as this will distribute the enquires more fairly. If you upgrade the limits don't apply and we have introduced a 'low cost' basic package and lowered prices on the other subscriptions.

We improved the account page to make it easier to get to
information on how your profile is performing and make improvements to
it.

Upgrading payments: Many of you got in touch over the last months to tell us about payment problems. Our payment provider has been declining an
increasing number of transactions; for reasons like using a card in one one country from another or trying to pay from a high risk country (which
for them seems to be an ever growing list with most of the Middle East
on it, Malta, Cyprus, most of Africa, etc). We have just plugged in an alternate provider which has a wide
range of funding options including: bank transfer, Western Union and
credit cards (registration required unless paying with Bitcoins). We hope it works
for you and let us know if there are any problems.

Been a busy couple of months. We have been working hard trying to make sure that Massage Republic works for as many people as possible. This has meant a lot of small changes fixing things that didn't work in different browsers and trying to make using the site easier.

For advertisers

We have completely upgraded the part of the site where advertisers manage their listings. We have also added in a page where you can see all of the statistics for the number of people who have seen and interacted with your profile.

You can now use the photo verification service for free (this is a limited trial at the moment, so take advantage of the opportunity if you have not verified your photos yet!)

We have heard many people are having problems with payments, so are working on providing some alternatives in the very new future.

For users

We have improved the way questions and reviews work based on your comments. We hope that more of you will get involved and share your experiences on the site.

For everyone!

Thanks for all of the feedback and support. We appreciate this a lot and will carry on working hard to make the site a useful place for all of you.

If you're reading this you either just got here or you want to keep up with what we're doing. Either way, we hope this post gives some context.

Massage Republic launched in Feb 2012 (sort of), we managed a decent site by May 2012, then busted our guts to get somewhere towards a cool site over the last months.

The feedback we got from users and advertisers has been fantastic. We have taken those comments and pushed them into the development of the site. What happened next was even better, stuff like this:

Thanks for the note, I have checked it out and use your
site regularly. If I am honest I thought when you said "We will remove all the
fake listings", in your last mail, that you were pulling my leg (so to
speak..!!). But hey you have done pretty much what you said, and the site is
greatly improved. Do you know how much your site has improved in
Dubai........You cannot find a forum here now which does not talk about Massage
Republic and the verified profiles being real.

We are really happy we have provided a bunch of working girls and guys with over 120,000 contact actions (messages+clicks on phone number+clicks on website) in the last three months. We think you are great and look forward to doing so much more in 2013.

In September we concentrated on some of the 'small stuff' that makes a difference. Most of that was behind the scenes improvements to make some of the processes work better. The presentation of search results was improved and we added a new section called 'What's happening' so users can see the latest reviews, questions and listings for a specific city. We also made some changes to make the site work better on mobile devices - we still have some work to do in that area, but we made a good step forward.

Last month, we reached an important milestone for us (and our advertisers) - since we launched in February we have generated over half a million of what we call 'contact actions' - this is a user sending a message, clicking to see a phone number or clicking through to see an advertiser's website. We know it is sometimes difficult for service providers to evaluate how useful their marketing is, so we are sending a summary out on a monthly basis to each advertiser.

We are trying to do something different and better for providers and thanks for all the great feedback we got from some of you directly. You are all beautiful and thanks for your support so far.

I would like to ask that you get in touch in the forums here if you have something to say (good or bad) as we really love feedback!

In between a little R&R, the Massage Republic team has been busy pimping up the site to make the hard return to work more fun for our users and more profitable for our advertisers.

A few days ago we launched a new look for the pages where we show results for user searches. We already got some positive user feedback and the stats show people are viewing more pages and contacting more advertisers. The only downside of this change is that it does mean that paying advertisers will get more visibility on the site than before (only fair for them and we do have to make a living somehow ;). Having said that, the increase in contact actions from the redesign also means people with free listings are also getting more leads than before. Looks like this is a win-win for everyone! But if you want more customers, you should definitely consider upgrading.

Last month we started building in more features for users to be able to share their favourites, reviews and a little bit about themselves. We will add to this start over the next months based on feedback and how people use the site and hope this will add value to the user experience for those looking for a little more.